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Key links:
Primary website:
seattlepi.com
Primary Twitter:
@seattlepi

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is an online news organization and former newspaper based in Seattle.

The P-I is the first major daily newspaper in the United States to become an online-only news outlet.

The P-I was founded in 1863 and has been owned by Hearst Corp. since William Randolph Hearst bought the paper in 1921.

It was kept afloat largely by a joint operating agreement formed in 1983 with the Seattle Times, an arrangement that the Times fought for years to leave.

After losing money each year since 2000$14 million in 2008 — Hearst put the paper up for sale in January 2009, then stopped printing the paper and went online-only in March 2009, cutting its editorial staff from 165 to about 20, with another 11 in advertising.

Though the P-I was a smaller newspaper than the Times, its web traffic before the online shift was comparable to the Times’. A year after the P-I went online, its traffic was holding steady, though the organization was not yet profitable.

The P-I hosts a network of more than 200 local blogs, both staff-written and reader-contributed. It has also focused more on local aggregation than strictly original reporting as an attempt to be “Seattle’s home page.”

The P-I has an arrangement with several of Hearst’s lifestyle magazines to provide features content for the site.

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Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: May 11, 2011.
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The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit news organization based in Washington, D.C., that produces investigative journalism on public-interest issues. The center was founded by Charles Lewis in 1989, who was its director until 2005. Its staff has fluctuated between 25 to more than 50 throughout the 2000s and 2010s; most recently, it laid…

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